Consider a hosted service provider who manages media servers and provides media services on demand for enterprises to be used by application servers. The service provider may provide direct links between the application servers and media servers. So, for example, when a desk-phone makes a call to an application server, which then decides that an announcement should be played, the application server makes a media request to the media server directly, to get allocated media connection information. The application server may then forward the allocated media connection information to the desk phone. Having direct links between the application server and the media servers may result in under-utilization for some media servers and over-utilization for other media servers. A similar issue with respect to under-utilization and over-utilization of media servers may also occur when operating in enterprise environments.